Two years ago someone shot a gang leader in the back at a downtown Auckland strip club and brothel. Police never had enough to prove who pulled the trigger.
Now, documents obtained by the Herald show the club’s manager helped clean up the scene and remove evidence, and reveal more about what went down that night. George Block reports.
It was approaching midnight at Femme Fatale and the senior member of the Mongols Motorcycle Club was kicking back in a private room with friends.
Located in a hulking grey building on Wellesley St West, the venue is a combination of a bar, strip club and brothel.
It bills itself as “New Zealand’s biggest and busiest Gentlemen’s club” with up to 50 women working there at any one time.
Its private rooms contain classic ‘50s American cars and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
For years Femme Fatale’s frequent flyers have included senior patched members of a range of outlaw motorcycle gangs, plus their hangers-on.
The club uses metal detectors to scan visitors for weapons.
But on April 8, 2022, as the senior Mongol partied in a private room, someone carrying a gun managed to slip past those scanners into the club.
A year earlier, the Mongols Motorcycle Club, a new arrival in New Zealand’s gang scene, had clashed with the Head Hunters in a series of public shootings and fire bombings.
The war culminated in a shooting at a swanky downtown Auckland hotel targeting a Head Hunter who had defected to the Mongols.
It was against this backdrop that the senior member of the Mongols, then serving as a leader in the gang, was relaxing at Femme Fatale on April 8, 2022.
This month, a District Court Judge granted the Herald access to court documents relating to the prosecution of the brothel’s manager for obstructing police.
They reveal what happened next.
The Mongol was in the private room with a number of others about 11.15pm when someone pointed a gun through the door and shot him in the back.
A summary of facts describes the gunman as an “unknown person” and he managed to escape before police arrived.
Meanwhile, associates of the senior Mongol took him to Auckland City Hospital before the arrival of armed police and paramedics.
He was initially reported to be in a critical condition.
The gunshot wound to his lower back has left him with lifelong injuries.
He ultimately lost his spleen, a kidney, and part of his bowel.
When officers and detectives arrived at the club they cordoned it off and removed patrons and workers from the building.
Shortly after, police spoke to Kim Pickard, the long-time owner of Femme Fatale. Police told him the club would be locked down and no one was to be allowed in.
A manager of the brothel remained at the scene of the shooting. She told police she stayed to tell prospective customers a VIP function was on and no one could enter.
From 12.44am to 3.52am, she and Pickard were in constant contact via text. He was outside the building and she was inside, telling him what the police were up to.
While inside Femme Fatale, the manager cleaned up the room where the shooting happened, wiping up blood and throwing out rubbish, “thereby tampering with evidence that police could obtain from the scene,” according to a summary of facts.
The evening after the shooting, the manager denied to police that she had cleaned the scene after officers had arrived and secured the premises, claiming she did not have any information that could support the investigation.
Police raided her Pakuranga home about month after the shooting.
When officers arrived she admitted she had a black taser in her handbag, a restricted weapon, which she said she used for self defence.
Both the manager and Pickard were charged with being accessories after the fact by allegedly actively suppressing evidence against a person who used a firearm to wound with intent to cause grievous bodily injury, to help him evade arrest.
Pickard pleaded not guilty and his charges were later dropped.
The manager later pleaded guilty to the more minor charge of intentionally obstructing police, carrying a maximum penalty of three months in prison or a $2000 fine.
She was sentenced to 40 hours of community work.
Pickard told the Herald this week he had done nothing wrong.
“We’ve moved on, we’ve forgotten about it,” he said.
He did not believe the incident could or should affect his operation or liquor licence.
Pickard said plenty of other venues in Auckland had experienced shootings in recent years, including Dr Rudi’s bar, strip club Calendar Girls and the Sofitel Viaduct Harbour.
Police are understood to have had a suspect for the shooting - a Head Hunter - but were unable to bring charges due to a lack of evidence.
No one was talking.
The Mongols, one of the world’s largest and most violent outlaw motorcycle clubs, was formed in California by Vietnam veterans in 1969.
They have a long history of involvement in the transnational drug trade, have spread to several countries and are designated as an organised crime group by authorities in the US, Australia and Europe.
The Mongols burst on to the New Zealand gang scene in 2019, when Jim “JD” Thacker set up a chapter in the Bay of Plenty after he was deported from Australia under the controversial 501 legislation.
Like the Comancheros, who had arrived in New Zealand the previous year, they brought a new level of sophistication to the drug trade, and a greater willingness to use firearms and extreme violence to achieve their aims.
The arrival of the Mongols sparked a turf war with rival gangs, including a shooting where 96 rounds were fired into a house.
Thacker was arrested in June 2020 as the primary target of Operation Silk, a police investigation into the Mongols’ drug crimes and violence.
He was jailed for a little over 22 years in 2023 after he was convicted on 40 charges including unlawful possession of firearms, participating in an organised criminal group, possession of methamphetamine, cocaine and MDMA for supply and money laundering.
The Mongols, bolstered by the arrival of more 501 deportees, continued to be a disruptive and violent force in New Zealand’s gang scene after Thacker’s arrest.
In 2021, they became embroiled in a tit-for-tat shooting war with the Head Hunters sparked by the Mongols taking over a North Shore motorcycle repair shop formerly used by the Heads.
They gave it the name “Northside Power Sports”, seen as an insult by the Head Hunters, who at the time used the term Northside to refer to their crew on the Shore. The previous year, an Auckland Head Hunter had defected to the Mongols.
Shortly after midnight on April 6, 2021, a car outside the repair shop was torched in a fire-bombing attack. Over the next few days the feud escalated, with properties linked to both gangs shot at repeatedly.
The conflict culminated in a broad daylight shooting on April 15 at the five-star Sofitel hotel in the viaduct, when two Head Hunters and a prospect targeted their former comrade who had defected to the Mongols.
While the arrests of the Head Hunters members behind the shooting, along with later arrests of senior Mongols figures, managed to put a lid on the feud, tensions continued to simmer.
A couple of days after the Femme Fatale shooting, the Head Hunters pad at 232 Marua Rd was again shot up.
The bad blood remains.
George Block is an Auckland-based reporter with a focus on police, the courts, prisons and defence. He joined the Herald in 2022 and has previously worked at Stuff in Auckland and the Otago Daily Times in Dunedin.
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